The meaning of rules and an interesting article

"The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules."
Gary Gygax

Just a quick musing, but I always thought that OD&D was ridiculously hard on players because if Swords and Wizardry is a clone of the original game, that kind of stuff would be in the three brown books. Then I look through the actual OD&D rules, and I realize something: What rules?

The booklets have no real instructions on handing out experience points (it states a troll has 700 xp, leading to people to believe that it's 100 xp per hit die), nor the amount of treasure found per monster, let alone how xp from it is divvied up. Of the rules that really are there, they are quite obtuse in writing (an elf can choose whether to be a fighter of a magic-user at the beginning of each adventure. What constitutes an adventure? A session? When the referee says?) I would go so to say that Original D&D is almost impossible to play without a hefty amount of house ruling. In reality, Swords and Wizardry is just one of many interpretations of what said rules mean.

For so long I've played games that explicitly tell me what to do and how to play and how to reward players along with hundreds of pages worth of rules to cover miniscule events that might pop up. Going back in time to this savage age of "guidelines" and "interpretation" is scary and frustrating, yet oddly liberating. I can't actually argue that our group is "playing it wrong", if there isn't any text on how to play in the first place. It's up to us. Our game, our rules.

In related news, here's an excellent article on why I shouldn't bother with linear plot in RPGs:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/checkfortraps/7540-Check-for-Traps-It-s-Not-Your-Story